George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw wrote more than sixty plays, won a Nobel Prize and an Oscar, and refused most of the honours he was offered. Born in Dublin in 1856 to a drunken corn merchant and a singing teacher, he left school at fifteen, worked as a clerk, and followed his mother to London at twenty, where he spent nine years writing five novels that nobody published and living on her earnings. He educated himself in the British Museum reading room, became a vegetarian and a socialist, joined the Fabian Society in 1884, and wrote its tracts for decades. He made his living first as a critic — music under the name Corno di Bassetto, then theatre for the Saturday Review — and used the position to attack the sentimental commercial stage and to promote Ibsen. His own plays were written as arguments. Widowers' Houses concerns slum landlordism, Mrs Warren's Profession prostitution as an economic choice and was banned for years, Major Barbara the money behind charity, and Man and Superman evolution and the life force. He supplied enormous prefaces, often longer than the play. Pygmalion in 1913 has a phonetician pass a flower girl off as a duchess by changing her speech, and argues that class is largely a matter of accent and manners. He wrote the screenplay for the 1938 film and won an Academy Award. He received the Nobel Prize in 1925 and gave the money away. His judgement failed him on Stalin, whose regime he defended after a stage-managed visit in 1931. He died in 1950 at ninety-four after falling from a ladder pruning a tree.
- Lived: 1856 CE – 1950 CE
- Nationality: Irish
- Roles: writer
